I’ve managed to read Diez’ article on al-Makin ibn Amid, the largely unpublished 13th century Arabic Christian historian. It’s a cracker! It is, indeed, the new entrance-point to all the literature on the subject. It also – ahem – mentions this blog.
I’ll post some more about this in due course. But I did start thinking … surely the first thing to do is to get a text of al-Makin into electronic form and get it on the web? I wonder how this might be done, at a reasonable price?
I wish I could think of a way to get hold of the edition printed in Cairo a few years ago!
UPDATE: I have just spent an hour trying to locate copies — some may be found in the UK in www.copac.ac.uk by searching on the editor, Ali Bakr Hassan — and placing an ILL when I suddenly remembered, rather embarassingly … that I have met Dr Hassan, at Oxford some years ago, when he was so kind as to give me a copy of it. A little searching and I have it in my hand. I must be getting old or daft. I have a vague memory — you can tell how good my memory is right now! — that his edition only covers part of the work, however.